The Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web”) have changed the landscape of information delivery and affected numerous aspects of life. One benefit of this technological development is the ability to conduct business transactions globally via the Internet. As the volume of commerce conducted over the network continues to increase, collections of business units or organizations are working together to pool resources and expertise in order to achieve a common business objective. Organizations are sharing services and resources across enterprise boundaries in order to undertake collaborative projects that they could not undertake individually or to offer composed services that could not be provided by individual organizations. Virtual organizations are formed with collections of different organizations while appearing to be a single, unified organization.
A growing array of technologies has emerged to help bridge the gaps between people, time and geography in such collaborative environments or virtual organizations. In particular, Enterprise Management Systems are developed to support the administration and execution of business processes within enterprises and organizations. However, such conventional supplier management solutions fail to meet the demands of emerging multilateral collaborative application and dynamic virtual organizations where business interactions do not just occur between a single, static main buyer and multiple suppliers. In addition, the participants in virtual organizations are frequently of different administrative domains. The overall business interactions may also impose multilateral process-based interactions between the suppliers, such that a choreographed behavioral model and message exchange are required. Stated differently, the choreographed behavioral model provides a set of expected behaviors in response to event which is significantly different from a centrally controlled behavioral model. Therefore, a buyer does not control every interaction in the workflow system but initialized the workflow process with a high level definition of the interactions.
Existing supplier management solution consists of many “one-off” interactions, each of which relates to a single purchase transaction. In contrast to these interactions, a virtual organization management system consists of smaller work units in turn containing multiple complex conversations. The final output of a traditional supplier management solution is also typically a physical product, while many of the virtual organization scenarios are based on interactions between electronic services and delivery of electronic or digital products, such as design, simulation and analysis data in collaborative engineering, brokering, advice and information in integrated financial services, or real-time monitoring in collaborative supply chain management.
Based on the above observations, it is necessary to have an electronically automated means of monitoring the lifecycle and state of the overall virtual organization and not just single interaction. As a result of these ongoing conversations and interactions, there is a need to be able to specify trust, security and contracting terms before the conversations are enacted and to monitor them throughout the enactment. Furthermore, the designation of being “dynamic” indicates that both the structure of the virtual organization and the actual participation may evolve over time to accommodate changes in requirements or new opportunities in the business environment. The present invention addresses these needs.